The sociology of Java annotations is interesting. As far as I can tell the Java community basically went "Oh my god! Sun actually gave us AN INTERESTING FEATURE!!!!" and, as one, went mad with delight and decided that they had to use the damn things everywhere and for everything.

Thank you Clinton, very informative! You raise some interesting points that I wasn't aware of before.I already had the impression that Java - the language, not the platform - is declining quality wise and reading rants like yours only reinforces that impression.

Recently I've been working with JBoss Seam. It uses annotations heavily. I'd really like to try using JRuby for some parts of the project, particularly testing (perhaps using jtestr) the part I can't figure out though is how to handle all the annotations.